A week before Christmas 1381, a small sixteen-year-old princess came ashore at Dover. After the anxieties of the crossing, she must have been alarmed by the storm the next day that battered the ship that had carried her over. She had lost her father, the emperor Charles IV, in 1378, and was now far from home. She was not entirely alone, of course. Apart from her own entourage, she was met in Calais by English knights who had paid court to her in Prague and was escorted in Kent by a large retinue including the uncles of the fifteen-year-old Richard II, her future husband. As Kent and London were epicentres of the recent revolt in England, she may have found a lack of warmth among the populace. The marriage, pursued, it was said, ‘without the consent of the kingdom’, was not seen in England as advantageous. Far from bringing a large dowry, Anne had been bought dear, with a hefty loan to her half-brother Wenceslas (Wenzel), king of the Romans and Bohemia; a large price, the monk of Westminster wrote, for ‘tantilla carnis porcione’ [such a small piece of meat]. It would nonetheless be a mistake to assume that she played a minimal role in the politics and culture of Ricardian England.